We finally downed Garrosh and since it is a fight where attention to detail is required in order to kill it, I'd like to share with you my thoughts and tips about it. This might be a long one, brace yourselves.

The change on heroic is that the adds can't be “tanked” properly, they will fixate to “a target near them” which most of the time is the nearest, but I've seen adds randomly run off me and towards the ranged DPS. What you wanna be doing here is pulling the boss and move him to a position where the iron star will hit. The adds from the right side will cross through your path and hopefully fixate on you. Throwing ranged abilities on them before they are actually on top of you seemed useless. Running straight up on top of the adds will greatly increase your chances on all 3 of them fixating on you, however the boss might get dragged out of range for the ranged DPS/healers. I just waited for the adds to come close to me and that didn't cause us any trouble. For the iron star impact, try to be the last one from the melee group to move out to ensure the adds get all hit by it. Keep in mind that the adds hit actually hard and they melee for SHADOW damage (I suppose as to deal the same damage to cloth/plate users) so you can't really mitigate their damage through SotR.

Offensive/defensive CD usage:

Pull the boss without using anything, meta will almost always proc and keep you safe, if however it doesn't, you can use an ardent defender there. When the adds reach you, blow HA and AW. When the other pack reaches, throw your light's hammer as well. For the first pack of adds, no CD is really necessary, but you can use a DP (unglyphed) when garrosh does his shout that makes everything deal more damage. For the second wave of adds, you will need to chain DP and GoAK when the boss does his shout. You really want GoAK to be up when you are moving out of the star, I found I am at my most vulnerable there. Do not use HA a second time, and save your Light's Hammer for the first transition.

Depending on if your group requires it or not, Devotion Aura is a great CD for the iron star impact, however I would advise you to save it for when the boss starts annihilating in the transitions, to ease things a bit for your healers to stabilize until the raid is stacked up.First transition

Preparing for the first transition:

Two things you gotta make sure happen here. First, you want some vengeance in order to unload all of your burst quickly before it falls off. If you were already tanking garrosh, let your off-tank taunt him 3-4 seconds prior so he can get some vengeance for himself. Second, pool your holy power and just before the transition happens make sure AS and LH are up, EF yourself for the 9% extra damage.

Killing the adds:

Protection paladin is just amazing for this, because of the fact that you can reliably lock down a pack of 3 for at least 3 casts (4 if you spec into blinding light stun) on your own. My strategy was as follows. I told my DPSers to help in 2 of the 3 adds of my pack with dots (or some small cleaves as they are running past it and towards their packs). Throw your LH and your AS as you approach the pack, use HW to stun the first cast, continue nuking the target your DPSers aren't touching, then use tauren stomp on the second cast (if for some reason you are blood elf, that AoE silence racial also works), then HW on the third. At least 1 add is bound to be dead by then, if you still get a fourth cast, interrupt one and single target stun the other.

Annihilate time:

When the adds that drop the light are dying, make sure you are not in melee to avoid one landing on you and wasting it. You shouldn't care about getting the debuff for this phase your HP pool/EF are enough to keep you up without requiring extra attention from the healers. What you should do instead is, at the time where the DPS are gathering up to take the light, go on the boss and position yourself facing away from your raid. This gives the boss an extra target to cast annihilate on and lessens the chances of your group getting an annihilate on top of them while they are waiting for everyone to gather and soak.

Phase two:

If you are confident that your co-tank's class can dish out equal amounts of single target DPS as you, simply do a swap every 4 or 5 stacks (don't swap earlier, cause the stacks are applied so fast that the boss can go taunt immune if you keep swapping all the time). If you usually do a lot more damage than him just solo tank the boss for the first 2 whirling phases. After the second whirling, you continue with the 4-5 stack switch. Another small tip. If the MC is happening in like 3-4 seconds, try to have your AS up for it. Provided that the people MCed are properly stack on top of the boss, AS will deal about 30% of their HP without critting instantly. Don't throw Fist of Justice there, the stun will remain until after the MC is done making you lose DPS. When the empowered whirlings start happening, TURN YOUR RF OFF. If you have it on, half the adds on the room will run towards you for some reason, I assume EF healing aggro. No need to turn it back on until the end of phase 3. Lastly, always use DP while the empowered whirling is happening. Healers will have their hands full trying to keep the spread out raid alive. If someone has 2 adds on him, stun one of them, then taunt the other.

CD usage:

Pop HA the moment you come down from the first transition (unless you have to use it there to kill everything fast enough). Don't use wings yet. Untill 5 stacks you shouldn't need any CD whatsoever. At 6 stacks use DP. Then comes the first whirling. The second round is tougher, you will go up to 11-12 stacks. Don't panic though. At 6 or 7 stacks start a CD chain of DP/Healer external/GoAK, which will cover you till your stacks fall off during the second whirling. Use your AW when your vengeance goes close to 100% for some extra DPS. When HA comes off CD use it a second time, it will be up by the time you need it again.

Second Transition:

Couple of things here. First, run like hell, never stop unless you can't find a path forward without getting hit by the fear. Your group must have some raid wide speed increase at the start, chain your Speed of Light after it. BoP your warlock or some other caster that can AoE on the move around halfway through the run. On the top, use Salvation on your highest burst AoE player. When the adds are gathered up, use HW to stun them. Throw down LH for extra AoE DPS. You won't really manage to do big numbers in this phase unless your overall AoE in your team is low, I for example did half the AoE my DK co-tank did.

For the annihilate again, ignore all the bubbles on the ground, even if one is right on your path towards the boss, just to make sure that if some DPSer/healer messes up and picks more than one, there are still bubbles left for the rest.

Phase three:

Before he transitions, make sure you have some vengeance and blow both your Cds at the bloodlust. Swap at 4 stacks. That's really the best way to minimize explosion damage on your raid. If your DPS is beastly you will only have 1 empowered whirling. In which case you just handle it exactly the same way as phase 2. If you get a second whirling and your raid is confident they can push a phase 4 very shortly after, don't bother killing off the adds, simply kite them. What you wanna do is put RF back on, pick up ALL the adds take them in one side of the room, HW stun them, pop Speed of Light (your raid can help with stuns and knockbacks) to run away from them. If you haven't pushed by then, when they reach you, stun them again and run (or get gripped by your priest healer). Remind your DPS not to bother actually stunning the adds, since the diminishing returns will just mess your own stun's duration up.

Phase four:

Tanking wise, very disappointing tank and spank. NO need for a tank swap here, just let whoever does more damage solo tank this phase. The only tip I can give you here is to have a CD up for when you are running with the boss for bombardmend. Other than that the boss does actually hit hard so if you see yourself needing assistance, just do a tank switch and that's it. If you are not the one tanking, make sure you help your malice groups.

If you are getting Garrosh under 20%, then it basically means you take one more Empowered Whirl, you have Empowered Desecrates to place before P3 and you break Empowered MC's which aren't very hard (especially with Warriors). You'd essentially have him low enough that even after healing, you'd be pushing after the 2nd Empowered Whirl. But if you aren't getting Garrosh that low, then yeah you're completely screwed.

rogue + warrior + warlock go far left, rest go far right. stacking vengeance on the warrior as well due to insane dps he's doing and the rogue is our best dps.in general you'll have to figure out who does most dps and maximize everyone's dps accordingly. mages are pretty bad. as are ferals and elementals, our setup feels pretty suboptimal for that phase in general and it gave us quite some issues.

2nd intermission we had a fear ward on the monk, didn't take much time to learn that. the huge advantage of doing that properly is that if you get garrosh to about 20% before the 2nd intermission, you'll push him to 10% just before the 2nd empowered whirl. then you'll get 2 more in p3, out of which you ignore the adds on the 2nd whirl.if you have really good dps, you can even completely ignore adsd and just push him to 0% before the 2nd whirl in phase 3. if you do that, you only have to survive two empowered whirls. depending on what raid setup you use, the empowered whirls are a problem and you'll need a proper CD for each.

the guild 'kill it please' has a good video on youtube that shows what you gain from having proper dps. hardly have to deal with whirls. I also like their phase 1 boss movement much better then what fatboss does. increased our dps a lot. definitely no reason to run out for the first desecrated weapon when trinkets are all up. just stack on the boss and kill it while healing through the dmg.

rogue + warrior + warlock go far left, rest go far right. stacking vengeance on the warrior as well due to insane dps he's doing and the rogue is our best dps.in general you'll have to figure out who does most dps and maximize everyone's dps accordingly. mages are pretty bad. as are ferals and elementals, our setup feels pretty suboptimal for that phase in general and it gave us quite some issues.

Is your Feral just not using Berserk for it or something? Because with Berserk a Feral can basically pop a group of 3 pretty hard. That comp is actually pretty good, the Monk, Ele, Prot, Lock all bring strong aoe stuns, you bring an extra melee so you have even better single target interrupts, and your group can basically shred mobs.

controlling the casts is certainly not a problem. could easily handle more mobs.did have a problem with dps, usually on 23-24%, so always pretty close. not sure if the cat keeps berserks for it.

our warrior tanks stacks up the most vengeance so the monk's dmg isn't that great. fire mages also not exactly excelling at burst aoe. pretty sure we'd be much better off with a hunter/retri paladin, for pure dps output.however it's enough anyway and when it comes to single target boss dps our setup is very good, so can't really complain.

I saw some videos where protpaladins were soaking "Annihilate" on purpose in the intermission, stacking up to over 700k vengeance, so they can nuke the shit out of garosh in P2.

I'm a bit confused how this works... wowhead lists Annihilate with 3.5 Mio Shadow damage each direkt impact. Also after the vengeance nerf. shouldn't annihilate not give vengeance?... I mean ok one with AD and another one with a Cooldown and the legendary cloak procc... but the rest... I only see the guy use DP and GoAk... which shouldn't be enough...

He has the 50% damage reduction debuff from the adds too remember, so it's hitting for 1.75 million before his GoAK and DP. Also, Vengeance from AoE still exists. It's "standing in the fire" effects that don't give Vengeance, like sitting in a void zone or something. Point blank AoE like Annihilate still gives Vengeance.

Schroom wrote:I saw some videos where protpaladins were soaking "Annihilate" on purpose in the intermission, stacking up to over 700k vengeance, so they can nuke the shit out of garosh in P2.

I'm a bit confused how this works... wowhead lists Annihilate with 3.5 Mio Shadow damage each direkt impact. Also after the vengeance nerf. shouldn't annihilate not give vengeance?... I mean ok one with AD and another one with a Cooldown and the legendary cloak procc... but the rest... I only see the guy use DP and GoAk... which shouldn't be enough...

highest value for me yesterday was around 750k vengeance from all anihilates. I only used the CD recommondation from [25H] Garosh from Paoanii which is basically Unglyphed DP -> GoAK -> Unglyphed DP. We also have Devo Aura up for the first few anihilates so its quite save.

what made a huge differnece for us was to stack vengeance on one tank in phase 2. kept having garrosh around 20% going into the 2nd intermission, then started to let our warrior tank stack up the tanking debuff to 9-10 and his dmg done to garrosh went from 60m to 90m and that's about 5% on the boss.

yeah I saw that with the buff as well yesterday before raid. had no time to edit my post here. but after speaking to my Raidleader we concluded that we won't do any of those vengeance games. first I personally just don't like and never have liked the idea of taking damage on purpose for Venegance.

Secondly we don't need them. and prefer playing a bit more defensively and safe. so we can use our CDs somewhere else.

so second night went by. Only 2.5 hours tho as the blizzard servers refused again for half the raid to log in (those problems are going on for weeks now...)

nonetheless. the last 30 Minutes we constantly managed to get past the second transition. meaning we managed staying below 25% Energy in the first transition. /dance in the back during the second one, and had a few looks on the 2nd part of Phase 2. unfortunately we couldn't really try out how the add handling works out, if I have to cancel RF or not, and so on.

but well. if we manage to pick up where we left tomorrow we might hopefully start working on P3 (before we take another week off of raiding, as people can't make it...)

Schroom wrote:yeah I saw that with the buff as well yesterday before raid. had no time to edit my post here. but after speaking to my Raidleader we concluded that we won't do any of those vengeance games. first I personally just don't like and never have liked the idea of taking damage on purpose for Venegance.

Secondly we don't need them. and prefer playing a bit more defensively and safe. so we can use our CDs somewhere else.

so second night went by. Only 2.5 hours tho as the blizzard servers refused again for half the raid to log in (those problems are going on for weeks now...)

nonetheless. the last 30 Minutes we constantly managed to get past the second transition. meaning we managed staying below 25% Energy in the first transition. /dance in the back during the second one, and had a few looks on the 2nd part of Phase 2. unfortunately we couldn't really try out how the add handling works out, if I have to cancel RF or not, and so on.

but well. if we manage to pick up where we left tomorrow we might hopefully start working on P3 (before we take another week off of raiding, as people can't make it...)

problem is that if your co-tank is a warrior , you probably going to have a boring time at progression ... he can easily solotank p2 with maybe 2 or 3 externals. It's not too hard. So for example in our raid i only taunt once in p1 to get a bit veng for t1. Then in p2 just before the whirl to get a bit veng. for LH and helping to get out the mind controlled people and in P3 because of the exploding tank debuff. Its basicaly the most boring fight for me i have seen in a long time. A bit anihilate soaking is no problem as i mainly using a short cooldown and a 1 big cooldown i know i'm not gonna need in a few minutes, also soaking does not stress healers or is any dangerous in this case. We tried the excesive vengeance shareing in some point at progression for a few tries but in the end the raiddmg was a bit lower or equal and we had a few "boss taunt imunities" to handle which is not good at progression

Secondly we don't need them. and prefer playing a bit more defensively and safe. so we can use our CDs somewhere else.

it makes phase 3 massively easier. we have to do 0 empowered whirl add killing. push him into p3 before the first empowered whirl in p2 and get him to 0% before the second emp whirl in phase 3, meaning we only get one emp whirl and those adds are being kited. not sure if thats viable if you 'skip' intermission 2 though, at least with our dps it wouldn't work out.

In case someone is on H Garrosh still:with the additional 8 ilvl boost, its plenty possible to 1tank/2heal this fight, and avoid a 2nd dream phase altogether. It takes good dps, but the rest is straightforward.

yes, also possible with 2 tanks and 2 healers. although it is preferable to do a DPS stop and just wait out the 2nd dream phase in the back (not playing it, don't trigger the adds, just stand back and wait)

why? if you skip the phase altogether and go to P3 immediately, your DPS Cooldowns won't be ready again, which could lead to missing DPS in P3 to enter P4 before the 2nd whirlwind.

we prefer wait, play 2 whirlwinds and 2 times adds in P2 after the 2nd dream before entering P3. having all our DPS CDs back up and just nuke it into P4.

Ok, I guess it is the Enh. shaman and the Feral Druid that get wrecked?

if it isn't your melees than your ranged DPS are failing. yes they should be close to the middle (except the 3 that run out for the weapon and the guy with engineer duty) but not as close as the melees.

usually when adds spawn, I run out to get the adds first. so I have them initially. then we have our DK massgip them to the boss, so they are all guarantied to be clumped up. only after that they start rescanning for targets.

they seem to behave in the way that they aggro on a random player out of the 4 players closest to them. (no confirmation, that is what we noticed while playing with only 1 melee)

for adds, yes you can stun, you can also push them (druid and shaman are amazing for this)

the first wave we kill on cleave damage together with the first weapon (focus damage).

the second wave of adds, we occupy with stuns and pushes until we get the iron star. then we just push them i there.

it still happens smetimes that one of the melees gets killed by the adds. there is always a chance, but usually we play with personal and external CDs on the melees if they have trubble.also healers can focus melees, as tanks and melees are the only ones really getting damaged here. (make sure to put your tanks and melees in the same group as your disc priest)

as for engineers. Warlocks can solo this easily. I'm sure every 14/14 HM warlock can tell your warlock how to do this. I only know that he has to specc destro, keep max amber and be in position when the engineer spawns in order do chaosbolt him down.

TIP. the hardest part of the fight are P1 until you work out how to handle adds. AND the toughest part is the first intermission. to clear the room before Garrosh reaches 25 energy. you are going to have a hard time without a Blance druid who keeps his Cooldowns for this.

common cause for having people get gibbed by warbringers is range dps and healers just not grouping up. it's pretty convenient for them to just step 5y back and never get hit as the warbringers only fixate on players close to them. however if all do that, that obviously means your 2 melees have a very high chance to get fixated by 2+ mobs. after garrosh's warcry they hit for up to 300k, so having multiples is bad.make sure your range dps are actually standing close enough to get fixates, at least some of them. also blow at least one shaman AG on those adds. the CD is two minutes. they are up again for the phase 2 whirls. elemental AG when aoeing with chain lightning means everyone is topped during it's duration. he should use that when the war cry goes off. druids and shamans can also knock adds back, buying healers a bit of time and causing them to refixate.

for the engineer, can send the disc, there's not much to heal, but a dps should be able to solo that. warlock is very easy with chaos bolt but warlock is also great aoe. we have our warlock do the first and then a not-so-great aoe class do the second. for the second impact you'll most likely be somewhat middlish so you'll take more wheel impact dmg. should aura mastery that and disc priest needs to be ready to shield anyone that takes a warbringer hit shortly before the impact in case those aren't dead.

and then you need to read up on first intermission. still the most annoying part of the fight.

Schroom, Kai, thank you so much for that info. We polished that phase and started making progress. As you have expected, first intermission is our next step so if you don't mind, I have a couple of questions more...

We can't reliably finish the adds before 25 energy so we are trying various combinations. 3 dps/3 dps/ rest middle is what we tried last and it was a bit meh. I let the other tank taunt Garry a couple of sec before intermission but I am not sure if it's worth it.

Trying to squeeze more dps out overall has me thinking we should just one tank the whole fight. Then again, maybe a better distribution would work just fine. We tried sort of like Kai has it (tank + 1 dps on one group) but RL decided to change it before we got any real practice with it.

What would you suggest for intermission group distribution and is it valid for the other tank to taunt for some vengeance?

yes, what we do, the off tank taunts about 4 seconds before the intermission, to stack some vengeance.

also we have our moonkin safe his CDs entirely for this phase. they do amazing AE DPS and with CDs an Starfall and everything they just mow everything down ^^

that's why I said a Moonkin would make it easier.

it could still be viably for you to have a DPS class with amazing AE DPS safe his Cds for this phase.

note that you still need a certain amount of DPS in Phase 1 tho.

for group distribution. as a Tauren paladin i do middle alone. you can stun with glyphed Holy wrath and the Tauren stomp.

we have a left group and a right group, me and the AE DPS that keeps CDs. so 4 Players on each side to DPS the groups and also we worked out a stun and kick rotation so nothing gets through. (shaman totem works to, but needs some practice)

I join the left group, while our Moonkin joins the right group when we are done with the first 3 groups and run inside.

the first 2 groups need to be dun the second I stun the middle group for the second time.

the middle group dies meanwhile while everybody runs in before the do a 3rd cast.

mow down the groups inside and have a tank trigger Garrosh instantly. because he only stops gathering Energie when he is triggered. if not triggered he continues gathering energy even when you killed all the adds!

communicate where you have barriers tog gather the buff for damage reduction.

as a tank you don't really need it, unless you want to do some vengeance exploitation.

now worth this info watch that part of my video again and you'll see just that.

other solutions to this exist and are viable, you may have to tweak it in order for it to fit your group.

because of burning rush? no way. between glyphed healthstone, (glyphed) ember tap, imp sac or cauterize master (in case you don't play with sac, use felhunter until end of p3 to interrupt MC and then during the RP when he sits on 0 health and you can't do anything, summon imp) and sacrifical pact, you can very easily off-set the burning rush dmg plus a lot more. killing warlocks isn't that easy.